Software AG to Buy CEP Vendor from Progress

June 13, 2013 – Software AG has big data intentions with a proposal to take complex event processing vendor Apama off the hands of Progress Software.

Progress had purchased privately held Apama in 2005 for approximately $25 million as an entry point into the CEP market. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed by any of the vendors, though it’s subject to closing conditions and anticipated to close in Q3. Research and advisory firm Celent had pegged the CEP market at $115 million in 2012, with expectations of 30 percent year-over-year growth through 2014 based largely in the maturity of real-time automation.

Broadly, Software AG noted the big data implications with advancing CEP solutions, including wider controls, testing and monitoring for the “industrial Internet,” and real-time operational data management streaming. In a release on the deal, Software AG stated it plans to operate Apama’s releases in harmony with its own low-latency messaging and in-memory technology. In addition, Software AG stated in a release on the deal that it will keep up the Apama product line and expand it in areas such as capital markets trading, and risk and surveillance. Software AG intends to take over Apama technology, technical and sales teams in Cambridge, U.K., Bedford, Mass., and Hyderabad, India.

Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst W. Roy Schulte says that Software AG is likely drawn to the deal by the increasing use of high-performance, event based analytics by business, as well as its own “intensifying competition” with TIBCO.

“This technology is at the overlap of real-time computing and big data – it is the computing used for fast, analytically enabled business,” Schulte says, later adding, “The competition in financial services CEP is remarkably stable – it has the same three vendors as five years ago (Aleri, Apama, StreamBase) but now each is owned by a bigger company (SAP, Software AG, TIBCO respectively).”

Stefan Ried, principal analyst with Forrester Research says the deal should be welcome news to Apama customers because it gives new life to its CEP products, provided Software AG hits on “what Progress missed.”

“Progress Software was until the recent refocus and divestment from multiple acquired products pretty much ran like a portfolio company with very little integration between the different products. In contract to this, Software AG's acquisitions over the last five years have been very closely integrated into the existing middleware stack,” Ried says. “If Software AG does the same with Apama, it will be of huge benefit for customers face hybrid integration scenarios.”

Apama was founded in Cambridge in 1998 and carries a cadre of European and South American industrial and banking customers. Apama recently released version 5.0 of its flagship solution with enhancements to its event processing language and integration with Progress’ database driver product.

Since last year’s sluggish quarterly returns, Progress has made a steady divestiture of products and lines outside its traditional business software core, such as breaking off FuseSource in a deal to Red Hat. However, the Apama line had been touted as part of its application development and deployment solution roadmap going forward. In a release from Progress on Thursday’s announced deal, CEO and President Phil Pead said only that the “Apama target market, deployment and sales model differ significantly” from Progress’ own application development platform. Earlier this week, Progress announced a deal to purchase privately held Rollbase, the maker of a cloud platform for business SaaS development, as the core of a push into the platform-as-a-service marketplace.

German-based Software AG announced a deal earlier in June for enterprise architecture and IT process management vendor alfabet as part of a targeted effort to make a name for itself in the native cloud business application space.